For many people, reality shows Basketball Wives, Miami and Real Housewives of Atlanta have metastasized in America’s psyche as a poisonous stereotype of African-American women.

Cloaked as entertainment, our marginalization as angry Sapphires and promiscuous Jezebels is encapsulated in each and every episode. At times, both juvenile and superficial — with a painfully obvious need for fame and external validity — these women have yet to realize that every cat-fight and backstabbing antic solidifies their pioneering role in a new Blackface era, where strong, successful women are reduced to mere caricatures of themselves.

Which is why it is so intriguing that the shiniest star in the BBW orbit is Evelyn Lozada.

You wouldn’t guess it by the petition spreading like wild-fire across the black wide web, but Lozada, a proud Puerto-Rican from the Bronx, is not African-American. Whether she considers herself to be black or not is a topic tackling race vs. ethnicity that is tangential to this article. Still, without fanfare or warning, she has become a symbol of many of the stereotypical depictions that have plagued African-American women since the dawn of time and all she needed to do was act like a damn fool.

How exactly did this happen? How was our distorted media image transferred so seamlessly to Lozada?

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry, host of MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry and author of the book, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, said in a discussion at the University of California, Santa Barbara, that many black women feel shamed by stereotypical images – many which have come to life in the contemporary narratives of Basketball Wives and RHOA — because we are still grappling with our identity in this country and asserting our right to shed the stigma of being black in America. With powerful honesty, she told the audience that seeing ourselves portrayed in a positive light instinctively “means something to us.” With this in mind, it would make sense that when we see these historical stereotypes weekly in high definition, the “color” of the person embodying them ceases to be important.

Not surprisingly, the topic of “race” is approached with extreme caution and vagueness on both shows. Leading many viewers, perhaps subconsciously, into believing that both Evelyn and Kim Zolciak of RHOA — the token white woman who tries so painfully hard be a stereotypical “sista” — are anomalies in a world where they are not representatives of their respective cultures. Rather, they are viewed as “honorary members” of our own – at least the mischaracterization of it that is spoon-fed to the world. Unlike the inescapable “otherness” of black skin in this country, their racial identity is safely tucked between the folds of what is stereotypically considered an African-American woman’s existence. Simultaneously, a fun-house mirror reflection of Black culture is being broadcast all over the world, then boomeranging back to polarize our communities.

In a previous Clutch article, I hypothesized that to feel disrespect, one must feel that a characterization is abusive, and to experience that abuse on a visceral level, one must feel that even if it’s not true of them as individuals, it is often true of their kindred in the collective. This is amplified on BBW and RHOA, where critics continue to cast judgment on what blurs into an all-Black cast and many of us will continue to shoulder the “shame” of two small groups of women because how we are represented “means something to us.”

While this concern is admirable, and at times necessary, the idea that black women must always be perfectly well-behaved — or risk shaming the community-at-large – is both unrealistic and unfair. We are fighting a battle that is unique to women of color in this country, and that is the duality of asserting our individual identities separate from stereotypical imagery, while fighting for the elevation of our communities as a whole. This places us in the precarious position of not being able to ignore the pervasive effects of reality television, while still recognizing that every, single one of these women has the right to present themselves to the world as they choose – whether anyone agrees or not.

At some point, the debate must be expanded to encompass not only how our narrow representations in media are affecting our communities, but to also address the more nuanced ground of individual identity – something to which black women seem not to be entitled.

Dialogue is essential.

And a good place to begin would be to examine why black women have been elected as torch-bearers for the entire African-American community at-large – trapped in a cycle of stereotypes that refuse to disappear.

Instead of opening our mouths to complain to other Black women for wrongfully representing “US” we should be opening our mouths to profess our individuality and to defend each other’s freedom to do as we please w/o the burden of “representing” our race

Beautiful Mic

To argue whether or not Evelyn Lozada is black because she’s ethnic Puerto Rican is like arguing whether or not Tina Knowles is black because she’s fully creole, or if Sheila E is black because one of her parents is Mexican-American and the other Creole.

African ancestry varies among Creoles, Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans. Subsequently, racial identity varies, and is ambiguous, within these ethnic groups as well.

Even though Evelyn Lozada has an Latino/Hispanic name and is middle phenotype, her African ancestry is quite obvious, and her social disposition, also, obviously makes her dubiously Black and Latina/Hispanic.

On the contrary, there are Latinos, such as Jennifer Lopez, with obvious African ancestry who don’t readily claim and/or identify with cultural, social or genetic connection with black Africans. Yes Lopez is intricately tied to a music genre spawned among the black and Afro-Latino youths of her native city New York, New York – a black music genre. But that’s where her tie to African descended peoples ends; the same way it ends for someone like Christine Aguliera, or Gwan Stephani (Ska music is a black spawn music genre).

Some like Jennifer Lopez simply identifies as Latino/Hispanic, with no specifically stated racial identity (passing for whatever is convenient). Many do this to retain the racial privileged that comes with being mestizo or mescla.

Evelyn Lozada claims her black Latino roots and identity and is willing to procreate with a black person (I think her daughter’s father is black). Jennifer Lopez married and procreated with another racially ambiguous mestizo Latino (Mark Anthony), like herself, who doesn’t readily connect himself with black (Afro) Latinos.

And another thing, the article states that Lozada is not African-American. Well, Puerto Rico is an American territory, so having direct parentage from the island would make Lozada as deeply rooted African-American as you are. She descends from the indigenous people of Puerto Rico and as well as African slave and white colonial bloodlines of a U.S. territory. If that’s not African-American enough, I don’t know what is.

http://museandwords.com NinaG

Thank you, Beautiful Mic

Merci

wow! really leads me to think. Thanks.

Yeahright2011

that is total bull you know it. i guarantee she will never have the same social experience as black women who look like Royce, Jennifer, Kenya, and Meeka. she knows she is a non-black latina, what that means for her, what that means here and in pr, and the perks that go with it. your genealogical cliff-notes aren’t even in the scope of the discussion and if you don’t think there are distinctions made between what is black and what is not in puerto rico than i want what ever is in that pipe ya smokin.

Alexandria B

I think you just became my new Clutch bestie….THANK YOU for adding more truth and texture to this conversation…..

I think some people just need to deal with light-skin privilege and leave the conversation of heritage off the table because its getting conflated and that is really tragic

Renee Bledsol

Well said! I am so sick of this, I encounter this with my children on a daily. Simply because they do not look black enough, or rather they are not as ethnic looking as I am. To the best of my knowledge Evelyn does acknowledge her blackness, I never assumed she ran from it and true be told she seems comfortable in her skin (she’s just a hood rat). Perhaps I have a different outlook on race as I am from South Louisiana, where black comes in all shades, from the palest blond/blue eyed to silky midnight. What I would like to suggest is that we stop worrying about what others think, and start educating young black and Hispanic girls about their history and gender.

Yeahright2011

@Alex

right? i don’t know what it is about blacks but black people get shamed and the big-picture speech while the “technically” black people get The Diary of a Mad Red Bone. ain’t that privilege right there? let upper middle class and up blacks talk about not being accepted by working/poor class blacks, they’d get hammered. and they should for feeling so entitled. evelyn had no problem telling jen “u will never be a white girl”. translation: “you’re an uppity negro.”

Beautiful Mic

“Your Black isn’t like mine” – Black people aren’t all the same”

“Your Latino isn’t like mine” – Latino/Hispanics aren’t all the same”

Latino/Hispanic is not a race, it’s a cultural identity. Puerto Rican is not a race, but an ethnic group, identity and former nationality…but, most importantly within the U.S. American landscape, it is an ethnicity.

There are Latinos who more readily identify with whites. Some identify more readily with Indigenous American tribes. For example, many Mexican-Americans who are mostly or totally of Indigenous Mexican lineage tend to align themselves with one or more of the 5 U.S. American First Nations (Cherokee, especially). Some Latinos identify more with blacks. Others identify more with mixed people, in general. And then there are Latinos who, generally, identify with everyone – perhaps, partly due to being ‘everything’ (in ancestry and cultural/social heritage) that ‘everyone else’ is.

QoN

@Beautiful Mic

Most of the people you named dont have obvious African ancestry. Evelyn does not look black. She may have some admixture from back in the day but then so do many blacks but we are still black for all intents and purposes. Black women have a problem with appropriating this ambigous women and I believe they do because they want their beauty and attractive attributed to their blackness. Its futile.

tisme

I believe that as black people go it was black men who started calling ambiguous women black first.I believe this was done after many of them were challenged by black women with issues for dating and marrying outside their race.

I don’t do cultural and racial theft.Don’t need to. I know my own value as someone who actually is black.Having watched many black women called haters by black men for stating the fact that Jennifer Lopez,Evelyn Lozada,Tomika Skanes,Halle Berry,Pilar are not black, I think black women are just going along with what black men say so as to not seem jealous. I also think some of them are going along with what some light skinned black people who don’t want to feel less black than Seal are saying as well.

I don’t do the one drop rule.My social achievements and accomplishments are mine.
I have no desire to claim that which does not belong to me.

I have no problem with white or other non black people but I don’t need to steal from them their beauty,accomplishments etc. to have something good to say about myself

Anon

Ya’ll are killin(!) me with this mess. Have any of you been to the south? I mean based on this nonsense, T.I. isn’t black based on your observations! WOOOOOOOOOOOoooo chile, I didn’t know that the paper bag test was going in the opposite direction these days.